Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof (16 page)

“I wasn’t suggesting that you should have.”

“Well, plenty of other people suggested it, and I know Laura thought I should. She’d always got whatever she wanted, so she couldn’t imagine somebody else not rushing to her side to take care of her.”

“What did she do?”

She shrugged. “She had high school friends who took her in, first one and then another until she graduated. Probably seduced all their fathers while she was at it. That’s what she did, seduced men. Every boyfriend I ever had, she took. I could have done the same thing to her, but I had morals. Not Laura. She never thought twice about seducing men. She still got some modeling jobs after high school, so it wasn’t like she was destitute. And anyway, I had my own problems. I had to support myself, and I had to do it with my brains.”

“Unlike Laura.”

“You bet, unlike Laura. Not that I wasn’t pretty.” She looked intently at me. “I’m quite good-looking, you know.”

She wasn’t, but I nodded.

“I’m not saying Laura was dumb, but she wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string either. She didn’t have to be, all she had to do was smile pretty and men handed her money on a platter.”

She smiled grimly. “And if they didn’t, she just helped herself, like she did with Martin Freuland.”

“She took money from Freuland?”

She gave a tense laugh and erased the air in front of her face.

“Listen to me! I sound like somebody on a talk show airing the family’s dirty linen. All I wanted to ask you was if you know anybody who’ll take that cat?”

It took a moment to realize she meant Leo. With a sense of relief, I said, “You’re not keeping him?”

“Oh, God, no. I hate cats. Laura was always begging for one when she was little, but I won that battle. Not that anybody really cared how I felt, but my mother hated cats too, and she put her foot down on that one.”

I’m always confused when I hear somebody say they hate any kind of pet. I can understand that a person might not want one, but I can’t fathom hating an animal just because it isn’t some other kind of animal.

She said, “I hate dogs too. If you ask me, it’s plain stupid for human beings to walk behind a dog, waiting for it to pee and picking up its shit. It must give dogs a big laugh to know they’ve got humans to be their servants.”

I said, “I took Leo to the Kitty Haven. That’s a boardinghouse for cats.” My own voice had picked up its pace as if it wanted to keep up with hers.

“I suppose the Sheriff’s Department authorized that too. My God, they must have sent out invitations. Take the cat, come in the house, take her things. If any of her jewelry is missing, I swear I’ll file an official complaint.”

Stiffly, I said, “Ms. Autrey, nobody will take your sister’s jewelry. And Leo couldn’t be left in the house after Laura was killed there. Now if there’s nothing else I can do for you, it’s time for both of us to leave. As I said before, this is not my house, and I’m not authorized to invite strangers into it.”

She shot to her feet and stalked to the front door. “And your time is so
valuable
.” She laid heavy sarcasm on
valuable
, intent on letting me know that she thought my time was worthless, and slammed the door behind her.

With the echo of the door still reverberating, I deliberately closed my eyes and relaxed my fists, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply—a trick my old shrink had taught me when I wanted to go yank somebody bald-headed.

A little whining noise made me open my eyes. Mazie and Pete stood looking at me, Mazie with a quizzical tilt to her head.

Pete waffled his eyebrows. “Holy smokes! That woman could talk the balls off a pool table.”

I said, “She’s rabid, absolutely rabid.”

“You can tell that, just by listening to her yak, yak, yak. What the heck was she talking about?”

“She was telling me what a lying narcissistic slut her sister was.”

“The sister that just got murdered?”

“That’s the one.”

“Man, that’s cold.”

Like a sloth, I unfolded myself from the sofa arm and stood a moment looking at Pete and Mazie.

“Pete, if she comes back here, don’t let her in.”

“Hon, you don’t need to tell me twice. I don’t like that woman. Neither does Mazie.”

“That makes three of us.”

Pete said, “It’s a damn dirty thing to go around telling lies about your own sister, even if she hadn’t just been murdered.”

I said, “Yes, it is.”

But as I went out to the Bronco, I wasn’t sure anymore which sister told the biggest lies. Laura had lied about being married and being pregnant, and she had lied about her parents. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she had been telling the truth and Celeste was the liar.

Except about the pregnancy. For sure Laura had lied about that.

But maybe the parents truly lived in Connecticut, and maybe there truly was a husband somewhere, and maybe his name was truly Reginald Halston and he was truly a surgeon. I wasn’t positive about any of those things anymore.

The only thing I was absolutely positive about was that children don’t seduce grown men.

24

Reba’s house is a cypress two-story with shuttered windows that are always open because she doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. The shutters began life a deep turquoise, but they’ve faded over the years until the color is almost non existent. Instead of ringing the bell, I walked along a rock path to the lanai at the back of the house. Big Bubba lives in a large cage out there, and I knew I’d probably find Reba there too.

She wasn’t on the lanai but in the yard behind it, where she’s put up double-decked bird feeders. She carried two plastic bottles that had once contained water but now were filled with seeds and peanuts. Lots of people who put out birdseed go to all kinds of lengths to keep squirrels and raccoons out of it. They set the feeders on tall poles, surround them with chicken wire, suspend them from high branches, or put cayenne pepper in the seed to burn the squirrels’ mouths. Reba just puts out the food and lets nature take its course. I guess psychologists know so much about human depredation they’re not fazed by anything animals do.

She said, “Dixie, how nice to see you!”

Reba is probably the only woman in the world who can sound like she’s in a receiving line while she’s feeding birds.

A young wood stork with a long dark bill and fluffy brown neck feathers stalked to the bird feeder as if he were claiming the best table at a fancy restaurant. Wood storks have such big funny feet, they look like they’re wearing tennis shoes. Reba poured peanuts and seeds into the feeder, and a mottled duck waddled forward to join the wood stork. A couple of blue jays swooped down to sort through the nuts, and the wood stork and duck withdrew.

So did Reba and I, hotfooting it to the lanai before the blue jays attacked us. I was annoyed at the thuggish dive-bombing blue jays for scaring the other birds away, but it didn’t bother Reba. She doesn’t believe in imposing human morals on nature. I don’t either, but I still wished the wood storks and ducks had got all the seed first. As Reba has told me more than once, I have a teensy judgmental streak.

From inside the safety of the lanai, we watched as several fish crows flew in and scared off the jays. Fish crows are even bigger bullies than jays. After the crows left with their peanuts, they were replaced by a flock of rose-ringed parakeets chattering like high school girls on a field trip.

Reba said, “I used to get bobwhites, but I never see one anymore. I’m going to have a martini. Would you like one?”

“No, thanks.” I figured alcohol right then would make me either throw up or pass out.

“Glass of wine?”

“Thank you, no. I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Let me get my martini first. I have better answers when I’ve had a little vodka.”

She scurried into the house, and I went to Big Bubba’s cage to say hello.

With their gray feathers, white-rimmed eyes, dark gray wings, and curved bills, Congo African Greys look like prim executive secretaries. But then you catch a glimpse of bright red petticoat feathers under their gray tails, and you know they have a racy side they don’t show the world.

I’m a little bit like that myself.

Another thing about African Greys is that they’re so intelligent they bore easily, and when they do they’re liable to rip out their own feathers.

I’m like that too, except for the feather-ripping part.

Big Bubba tilted his head to give me the one-eyed bird look. He said, “Did you miss me?”

I laughed, because I knew that was something Reba asked him every day when she came home. He laughed too, bobbing his head to the rhythm of his own he-he-he sound.

Big Bubba was a great talker, but not so hot as a conversationalist.

Reba came out with a martini glass in one hand and a plastic bowl of sliced banana in the other. She set her glass on the lanai table and put the banana in Big Bubba’s cage. Then she motioned me to a chair at the table and sat down herself. With her eyes fixed on me, she took a dainty sip of her martini.

“What’s wrong?”

It’s a mistake to pretend with Reba, so I told her the truth.

“I’m sure you heard about the woman who was murdered in Fish Hawk Lagoon.”

“You knew her?”

“I have a client next door to her, and she invited me to dinner a couple of nights before she was killed. I’d only just met her, but I liked her a lot. She told me she had run away from an abusive husband in Dallas. Said he was a sadistic surgeon. She said she was pregnant and didn’t want her husband to inflict his sickness on their child.”

“Do you think he killed her?”

I shifted uneasily in my chair. “As it turns out, there is no husband. She made the whole thing up. She wasn’t pregnant either.”

Reba took another sip of martini. “So she lied to you.”

“Yeah, and tonight her sister told me some other things about her. She said she’d seduced every man she’d ever known. She also said somebody had called her a narcissist. What is a narcissist, anyway?”

Reba shook her head. “Wait, who called who a narcissist?”

“The sister’s name is Celeste. The murdered sister is Laura. Celeste said somebody told her that Laura was a narcissist.”

“Somebody who? Her hairdresser? A bartender? A jilted boyfriend?”

“Um, I don’t know. She just said somebody.”

Reba pulled a toothpick from her martini and nibbled on its olive. “People throw diagnostic terms around all the time without knowing what they mean, but narcissism is a personality disorder marked by grandiosity—a grossly inflated sense of importance or intelligence or talent that has no basis in fact. There’s also a sense of entitlement. Narcissists believe they should have whatever they want because they want it. They lie a lot, and they take unfair advantage of people who love them.”

“Laura didn’t seem grandiose to me. She seemed completely normal.”

“But she lied to you, and the lies would have eventually led to more lies, like a miscarriage or a divorce. We don’t know if what the sister said was true about her being narcissistic, but lying about a husband and a pregnancy certainly raises a red flag. The truth is slippery to narcissists, even when there’s no advantage to them in lying. It’s part of their need to control. If they can fool you, they feel powerful.”

I said, “I don’t know how truthful Celeste is either, because she also said Laura had seduced their father when she was nine years old. Said he went in Laura’s bedroom almost every night because she lured him in.”

“Oh.”

I said, “She was very beautiful. Her sister said she was a child model. The whole family lived on the money she made modeling.”

“And the father sexually abused her.”

“If what the sister said is true, he did.”

Reba said, “If he molested one child, I’d be surprised if he didn’t molest the sister too.”

With a look of distaste, she took a deep breath and seemed to pull up some invisible page of lecture notes. “Children have instinctive expectations of love and loyalty from their parents. Sexual abuse is the most basic disloyalty, not only from the parent who inflicts it, but from the parent who allows it.”

She took another sip of her drink and set her glass down with a gentle hand.

“The most basic human need is to love and be loved, but we have to be taught how to love by receiving love. Love always includes loyalty. When a child gets neither love nor loyalty from her parents, she grows up with a narcissistic exaggeration of self-love. Even if somebody truly loved her, Laura would have been too emotionally fragile and too involved with herself to seek real intimacy with another person. Instead, she would have focused on being in control so nobody could be in control of her.”

I nodded. “Her sister said she took advantage of people.”

“She wouldn’t have seen it as taking advantage. She would have seen it as being the one in power rather than the helpless one.”

“What about what the sister said about her being a slut and seducing every man she knew?”

Dryly, Reba said, “I doubt she had to work hard to seduce them, but narcissism frequently manifests as control through sexual seduction, especially if there has been sexual abuse in the person’s childhood.”

I swallowed against nausea. “That all sounds terrible.”

“Narcissism is a terrible disorder, and it’s made even worse by the fact that narcissists are always desirable. That’s how they seduce.”

“There wasn’t anything sexual in my feelings for her.”

“Desiring somebody isn’t necessarily sexual. We desire intellectual stimulation from one person, humor from another, spiritual enlightenment from another, all those things are just as seductive as sex.”

“Her sister thinks her former employer killed her. He was a bank president, and Laura worked for him.”

“According to the news reports, she was stabbed.”

“Repeatedly. I was there when the deputy found her, and it was so gruesome that he threw up. Her face was mutilated.”

“After she was dead?”

“How did you know?”

“Pathology is magnetic. One pathology attracts its own kind in a different form. Piqueurism is another personality disorder that basically derives from a need to control. A piqueurist derives deep satisfaction from the power of causing terror.”

My mouth had gone dry. “There was a man stalking her. He’s a nurse who lost his license because they think he may have smothered some old people in a rehab center. Suffocating people would give a psycho a sense of power, wouldn’t it?”

Reba drank the rest of her martini and set her glass down with a sharp click.

“Dixie, I hope you’re not involved in this investigation.”

“I’m not.”

“You say that, but you have a way of—”

“Honest, I’m not involved in any way. I thought I would be, because I felt like Laura’s murder was something that could happen to any woman, and I wanted to see her killer caught. But it’s more complicated than that.”

“That may be the understatement of the century.”

I stood up. “Thank you, Reba.”

“You’re welcome.”

I told Big Bubba goodbye and left. The last I saw of Reba, she was headed back into the house with her martini glass. I had the distinct impression that our conversation had caused her to need a second drink.

Michael and Paco were gone when I got home, but Michael had left a tomato-and-basil pie on my kitchen bar. The day sat heavily on my shoulders, and only the aroma of Michael’s tomato pie kept me from going straight to bed. I poured a glass of Riesling and carried it and the pie out to the table on my porch. A yolk of sun was ankle high above a glassy sea, and the sky was shade-shifting from lambent blue to mango. Pedestrian bird traffic was light on the beach, where a gentle surf was tatting lace edging on the shore. A great egret glided down to my porch railing, pivoted toward the sun, pulled one leg into his skirts and balanced on one foot while the breeze luffed his feathers.

Michael’s pie was delicious—puff pastry, overlapping slices of ripe tomato, dark green basil leaves scattered over the top, good Italian olive oil drizzled on with a sure hand, and a light touch of garlic—exactly the light supper I needed after all the heavy information I’d digested. I ate it while I watched the sun slide down the sky and slip below the sea, sending out shimmering banners of gold and cerise.

The egret flew away with a great flapping of wings, and I sat in the draining light and thought about Laura Halston’s life. And about her death.

If what her nutcase sister had said was true, Laura had been treated as a sex object from the moment she was born. Used and abused by her father, envied and shunned by her mother and sister, and ultimately left alone when her parents died. At seventeen, no longer able to command large fees for being a beautiful child, she’d had to create a world for herself with no tools except her beauty.

It was hard to condemn her for using sexual seduction to keep from feeling helpless. That’s what she’d been programmed to do—it may have been the only thing she knew how to do. I wondered if she had loved Martin, the bank president, or if, as Reba had said, she had never loved anybody because she’d never
been
loved. I had heard Martin tell her she owed him, but he hadn’t said what she owed him. Was it love? Had Martin loved her and she had rejected him? Could he have been the one who got satisfaction from seeing her terror as he repeatedly stabbed her?

When I’d had dinner with her, Laura had spoken of Celeste as if the two were close, but Celeste had seemed contemptuous of her sister. Had that been grief talking? Old bitter rancor that had never been expressed when Laura was alive that was now boiling over? Or perhaps Laura had been playing a role for me when she spoke of her sister as if they were friends.

Guidry had said Celeste claimed Laura was the one who had reported Martin to the federal authorities for handling buffer accounts for drug dealers. How did Celeste know that? If Laura had told her, wouldn’t that point to a closeness between them? And what had Celeste meant when she said Laura had stolen from Martin? Stolen what?

I thought of Frederick, the nurse, and groaned. Was he just a sick man who preyed on the elderly, or had he been so enraptured by Laura’s beauty when they met in the ER that he became obsessed with her and killed her? If Celeste was to be believed, Laura would never have given an out-of-work nurse a moment of her time because he had nothing she would have wanted. But what about Gorgon, the thuggish guy I’d seen at the Lyon’s Mane? He probably had gobs of money, and he would have been a challenge to a woman who liked to seduce and control. If, in fact, that’s what Laura had liked to do, which nobody knew for sure.